Black Flags

by Joby Warrick

  The night-owl schedule allowed the analysts to stay in sync with the commandos who conducted nightly raids on suspected insurgent hideouts. Captured fighters were immediately evaluated in an interrogation building next door to McChrystal’s operations center. Other specialists quickly sorted through the night’s “pocket litter”—cell phones, paper notes, maps—for scraps of information that might point the way to the next night’s raids. The NSA’s surveillance experts, arrayed around the same wooden tables as the commandos and CIA officers, added an additional layer of data from the day’s video footage and cell-phone intercepts. The numbers of airborne cameras steadily grew, until much of the country was under twenty-four-hour scrutiny—an “unblinking eye,” as McChrystal termed it—with the added advantage of being able to run the tape backward to retrace the movements of insurgents planting roadside bombs.

  By the fall of 2005, the impact of the new strategy was unmistakable. McChrystal’s teams were slowly eviscerating Zarqawi’s command structure, removing scores of midlevel operatives responsible for everything from logistics and communications to recruitment and training. The list of Zarqawi lieutenants killed or captured grew to one hundred names, then two hundred. Of twenty-one known senior deputies, those closer to Zarqawi in the command chain, twenty were crossed off the wanted list, either dead or in prison. From Balad and Baghdad came a steady flow of confidential military cables reporting disrupted terrorist plots and vast stores of weapons and explosives seized and destroyed. One report dispatched to the Pentagon in late September described the discovery of a letter, signed by Zarqawi himself, authorizing an attack on the infamous Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, where many of Zarqawi’s men were being held. The strike was to be carried out by “AMZ elements”—the military abbreviation for Zarqawi’s forces—in October or November, during the annual Ramadan observance, a time when an act of martyrdom is said to carry special rewards in the afterlife.

  That plot having been exposed, Ramadan was relatively quiet by Iraqi standards. But five days later, on November 9, 2005, the TV monitors in McChrystal’s operations center flashed urgent news. Across the border, in the Jordanian capital, three hotels were struck by suicide bombers in coordinated attacks. Scores had been killed.

  McChrystal was at work that night, and he watched with his aides as news reports showed the Amman Radisson Hotel’s shattered lobby and the covered bodies lined up in the driveway. There was little question about who was behind the attack. In McChrystal’s mind, there was also little doubt that Zarqawi had made a grave, and possibly fatal, miscalculation.

  “That,” McChrystal said to a deputy sitting near him, “was a screw-up.”

  15

  “This is our 9/11”

  On the morning of the attack, Sajida al-Rishawi awoke for dawn prayers with the certain knowledge that the new day would be her last on earth. She idled away the hours in an empty rented apartment, killing time until her partner returned with the package that would allow them to start the final preparations. Finally, Ali arrived, and within minutes he had carefully begun to unwrap the bombs that had led them to make the perilous journey across the Iraqi desert to Amman. At last they lay side by side: his-and-hers suicide vests, tailor-made for the couple and constructed to be powerful, yet slim enough to go unnoticed under their street clothes.

  Rishawi had not seen the vests until now; suddenly the time was nearly at hand. She picked up her vest, felt the surprising weight, touched the pouches bulging with steel bearings. It was important, she knew, to familiarize herself with the cables and detonating switch, and to make the little adjustments to ensure a proper fit around her shoulders and belly. Even a suicide vest should fit comfortably.

  “He put one on me, and wore the other,” the thirty-five-year-old Ramadi woman would say. “He taught me how to use it, how to pull the trigger and operate it.”

  Captain Abu Haytham listened quietly, careful to avoid any reaction that might halt the torrent of words. It was the second day of Rishawi’s interrogation, and he was relieved that the woman was finally talking. All around Amman, memorials were still under way for the victims of the worst terrorist attack in Jordan’s history: three simultaneous bombings at three hotels that had killed sixty people and shaken the country to its foundation. Abu Haytham, the senior deputy in the Mukhabarat’s counterterrorism division, was now deep into a guided reconstruction of the crime, led by the suicide bomber who had lived.

  The interest in Rishawi extended far beyond her role in the plot. The attack’s principal author had quickly claimed responsibility, and the Mukhabarat had concluded from other evidence that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was behind the deed. The question now was whether this hollow-eyed, emotionally distraught Iraqi woman could help point the way to Zarqawi himself. A suicide bomber could never have been part of Zarqawi’s inner circle, but this woman had been selected for an unusually complex mission, one that required forged travel documents and an international border crossing. Someone had regarded Sajida al-Rishawi as worthy of a role in al-Qaeda in Iraq’s first mass-casualty terrorist strike outside of Iraq. She might know the names of her recruiters, or perhaps the identities of the men who had trained her, or acquired the fake passports, or assembled the bomb. She might know of other operatives who were even now preparing for future attacks inside Jordan.

  Others from the intelligence service were simultaneously playing out different strands. With a renewed urgency, the spy agency’s teams arrested and interrogated Jordanians and foreigners suspected of having connections with the terrorists. Newly assembled undercover teams were moving into western Iraq to troll for snippets of information that might offer forewarning of Zarqawi’s next strike. Yet the best hope for stopping Zarqawi lay in finding an insider, someone who could guide the Jordanians through the elaborate layers of the terrorist’s security cocoon.

  Inevitably the Iraqi woman would talk. With Rishawi, there would be no cause for anything more coercive than the captain’s own voice.

  The outlines of the woman’s unhappy life emerged slowly, between bouts of quiet sobbing. Rishawi came from the volatile heartland of Iraq’s Sunni tribal region, the sister of two men who had joined Zarqawi’s insurgent movement in the early weeks of the American occupation. One of her brothers had become a midlevel officer with AQI before being killed by U.S. troops in the town of Fallujah. The Americans had also killed a second brother and a brother-in-law. The woman had been distraught over their deaths, and she felt a tug of obligation: according to tribal custom, Sunni Iraqis are obliged to avenge the killings of family members. The fall of 2005 brought a painful anniversary—one year since the first brother’s death—along with the news of the first use of women as suicide bombers in the Iraqi capital. The authorities had been taken by surprise; females were usually waved through security cordons, and their loose-fitting abayas, together with Iraqi taboos against searching women, made it easy to conceal explosives.

  So Rishawi volunteered.

  “I want to kill Americans,” she told Abu Haytham, describing her pitch to the AQI contact she had met through her brothers.

  Zarqawi’s plan would unite the unmarried Rishawi with Ali, a man she knew from her hometown, as husband-and-wife suicide bombers, an ordinary middle-aged married couple who could walk into any public building without drawing a second look.

  In early November, the couple met with two other Iraqi volunteers and their AQI contact to finish preparations. Rishawi and her partner were handed fake passports identifying them as a married couple, and told, for the first time, that they were participating in a critical mission across the border in Jordan, one that would target U.S. and Israeli intelligence officials. They also were given a realistic-sounding cover story: they were traveling to Amman for infertility treatments to help them conceive. As a final step, they were brought before one of Zarqawi’s hired clerics for a hasty and legally dubious marriage ceremony. It was done not for the couple’s sake—presumably, they would never live to consummate a marriage—but to a
void violating one of Zarqawi’s strict religious codes. To the Islamists, it is forbidden for a woman to travel unless accompanied by her husband or a close male relative.

  They waited for the Eid al-Fitr holiday, with its traditional feast marking the end of Ramadan, and the next morning they began the daylong trek across the desert to Jordan. Their travel documents passed scrutiny at the border crossing; finally, wearily, they arrived at the rented apartment arranged for them in one of Amman’s predominantly Iraqi neighborhoods. The bombing was still four days distant: November 9, a date that Jordanians, like Europeans, abbreviate as 9/11.

  When the day came, Ali produced the vests and helped her with the fitting. He secured the twenty-pound band of RDX explosive and shrapnel around her waist and, to ensure that everything was firmly anchored in place, wrapped layers of duct tape around the outside. Then they climbed into a rented car and made their way to the Radisson Hotel, where they arrived a little before 9:00 p.m.

  The festive sight and sounds that greeted them in the hotel’s grand Philadelphia Ballroom confused Rishawi, according to her account to Abu Haytham. Instead of English-speaking intelligence operatives in Western suits, she saw something far more ordinary and familiar.

  A wedding.

  Peering through the ballroom door, Rishawi saw families with small kids, and young girls and women wearing the formal gowns of a bridal party. Men were lined up along one side of the room, and women on the other, for the dabke dance that is traditional at Arab weddings. She watched, unsure what to do.

  A hotel clerk approached the couple. Were they looking for someone? Rishawi’s partner murmured something about wanting to see an authentic Jordanian wedding. Now they were forced to move.

  Inside the ballroom, the two Iraqis separated and worked their way toward opposite corners, with Rishawi taking a spot near the women and girls. With one hand she reached into her overcoat and began to fumble with the detonator switch on her bomb. Why it failed to explode was never clear—was it a mechanical fault, or faltering nerves?—but the woman began motioning to her partner that there was a problem. With an agitated look, he pointed toward the ballroom door.

  As she turned to leave, she could see him begin to climb onto a table. Then came the awful explosion.

  “I didn’t know what to do and I couldn’t get rid of the belt,” she would later say. “So I ran.”

  Rishawi fled through the lobby with the panicked wedding guests, stepping over the wounded and dying. When she finally stopped, gasping for breath, she was far from the hotel, still wearing the suicide vest and the black overcoat, now flecked with blood.

  Later, in a taxi, she became agitated and confused, unable to remember addresses or landmarks. Shop owners and passersby would remember the strange woman in black who climbed out of the cab to ask for directions, speaking nervously with an Iraqi accent, and then walked with an odd, stooping gait. One who encountered her remembered that the woman was “just not normal.” Rishawi remembered stumbling up to the home of her sister-in-law and collapsing onto the bed, where the Mukhabarat’s men eventually found her.

  Now, after days of replaying the events in her head, the confusion had turned to despair. Where were the American intelligence officers she had been sent to kill? Surely this had not been Zarqawi’s intention.

  “They told me I would be killing Americans,” she complained repeatedly to Abu Haytham. “All I wanted was to avenge the deaths of my brothers.”

  She had been duped, and yet she clung, childlike, to the belief that something had gone wrong with the planning of the operation. Though she had never met Zarqawi, she could not grasp that the leader of AQI had really wanted her to sacrifice her own life to kill mothers and children at a wedding party. The fault was probably hers, she said, for, deep down, she had never been sure that she would be capable of pressing the detonator when the moment came, with her future and that of so many strangers balanced on a tiny metal pin.

  “I didn’t want to die,” she said softly.

  The questioning continued for days, but the limits of Rishawi’s helpfulness were already becoming clear. She had never met any of the senior leaders in Zarqawi’s organization. She was not a foreign recruit who might possess knowledge of safe houses or smuggling routes. Nor was she an Iraqi insider who might have insights into Zarqawi’s patterns of movement. She was not, in fact, very bright. But for Zarqawi and his men, Rishawi had been perfect: a grief-stricken woman who could be persuaded to carry out a revenge mission against a target that did not exist. Even at that, she had failed.

  Abu Haytham could not bring himself to feel pity; the horrific images from the Radisson ballroom were still too fresh. He left Rishawi in her cell and went back to his office, back to the task that now mattered more than any other: finding Zarqawi.

  For Abu Haytham, the quest would become an obsession. Within the Mukhabarat, the counterterrorism deputy’s stamina was legendary; everyone knew he often slept and showered at the office so he could work longer hours. Now, days would pass before he went home at all. Joining him on the case were scores of officers detailed from other divisions. Even translators and file clerks were pulled in to work the search.

  “Everyone got the call,” one officer remembered. “It was just, ‘Get your weapon and come to work.’ ”

  —

  Zarqawi had searched for a way to spur his five million Sunni countrymen into action, and by that measure he had succeeded. Jordanians throughout the country were enraged and united—against him.

  Within hours of the blast, thousands of people swarmed Amman’s streets. Large crowds gathered in a square near Amman’s oldest mosque, many chanting, “Burn in hell, Zarqawi!” Others marched somberly behind a woman in a black mourning dress who wore a sign expressing sympathy for “the brides of Amman.” Religious leaders denounced the deed and its perpetrator from the minbars of the country’s mosques during Friday prayer services. In the terrorist’s hometown of Zarqa, his brother and fifty-six other relatives posted an ad in a local newspaper publicly renouncing their kinship with him.

  Since the widely reviled U.S. invasion of Iraq two years earlier, Jordanians had been mostly quiet about the terrorist campaign under way next door. Though disturbed by the images of Iraqi car bombings and executions, some took satisfaction in witnessing the crumbling of the Bush administration’s plans for reshaping the Middle East. In some of Amman’s poorer neighborhoods, Zarqawi had been regarded as a kind of folk hero, protecting Iraq’s tribal brethren from persecution by Shiites and Americans.

  Now, and for years to come, Jordanians would speak of Zarqawi with contempt.

  “This was a criminal cruel act that Islam has nothing to do with,” one of the Amman protesters, a shopkeeper named Jamal Mohammad, told the city’s English-language newspaper as he twirled a large Jordanian flag.

  “Zarqawi is a delirious criminal. He has lost his mind,” spat another.

  Other Muslim voices echoed the refrain, from Internet chat rooms to newspaper op-eds to university campuses. In Iraq, Zarqawi had claimed that U.S. troops were his enemy, yet he killed innocent Iraqis. Now, in Amman, he railed against the monarchy and its servants, but he chose to slaughter women and children attending an ordinary Sunni wedding ceremony. Even the conservative Muslim Brotherhood denounced the bombings as “ugly and cowardly terrorist acts that cannot be justified under any logic or pretext.”

  The news of the bombing sent King Abdullah racing back to Jordan from Kazakhstan, where he was on a state visit. He flew all night, receiving updates and fielding sympathetic calls from other leaders, before finally arriving in Amman at 5:00 a.m.

  Later that day he toured hospitals to visit the wounded survivors and appeared on national television to calmly assure Jordanians that the monarchy would “pursue these terrorists and those who aid them.” Inwardly, he was seething, he acknowledged afterward.

  “We’re going on the offensive,” he told a hastily called meeting of the heads of Jordan’s security establishment. “Wh
at Zarqawi did was reprehensible. The gloves are off, and I want you to get him.”

  What Abdullah meant was not entirely clear at the time, perhaps even to him. But that day marked the beginning of a shift in Jordan’s security policies. The Mukhabarat prided itself on keeping Jordanians safe, and the monarchy was seen as a reliable partner in sharing information about suspected terrorists with other countries, including the United States. But now Jordan would take a much more aggressive posture against al-Qaeda. Breaking with a long reluctance to work directly with U.S. troops, the monarchy began to deploy specially trained Mukhabarat teams to help American special-forces operators break up terrorist cells inside Iraq.

  The change in tone was already clear a day after the attack, during a brief conversation between the king and Robert Richer, the former CIA station chief in Amman, who had become friends with the monarch during his two stints in Jordan. Richer, who now held the number two post in the CIA’s clandestine Directorate of Operations, called the king to express condolences and ask about the investigation.

  “This is our 9/11,” Richer recalled the king saying. “This changed our optic.”

  Abdullah had known one of the wounded victims personally, and his visit to the hospital both moved and infuriated him. “They attacked innocent civilians,” he fumed. “They killed the bride’s father. They killed her husband’s father.”

  The demonstrations faded in the weeks that followed, but Jordanian resolve appeared to hold. Even Islamists who had previously defended Zarqawi seemed ready to see him go, one longtime undercover operative said.

  “People who would have never worked with the Mukhabarat were coming forward,” the operative said. “Everyone wanted to talk about him now. Zarqawi had crossed a line.”